Agilent/Keysight Keeps Focus on Innovation

"Insight with innovation in digital design and test." That’s how Siegfried Gross, Vice President and GM, Electronic Test Division of Agilent, described his company’s core customer value proposition at a press conference at DesignCon.

Siegfried Gross at DesignCon 2014

The value proposition is consistent with the new tag line "Unlocking Measurement Insights for 75 years," to go along with the future new name of Agilent’s electronic test business, Keysight Technologies. The name, which was announced in early January, becomes effective in November 2014 when the company splits into two entities."

The company’s new logo features a waveform, said Gross, which was reproduced on a company engineer’s oscilloscope within an hour after the name change was announced internally.

Gross went on to emphasize that Keysight will continue to deliver value to engineers by keeping its innovation engine going full steam ahead.

Touching on major trends including innovations in power generation, mobile devices, cloud computing, and the need for power efficient architectures everywhere, Gross said that Agilent/Keysight is pursuing a multi-prong strategy to maintain a position of strength in the high-speed digital space by: Close engagement with the industry; participation in all of the major standards committees; and a relentless focus on innovation, particularly in the area of complete test solution offerings.

"Given the unrelenting pressure to achieve higher performance and lower power combined with a step function increase in demand for higher bandwidth, our commitment is to have all of these interfaces tested and ready and have the protocol solutions for our customers."

Agilent/Keysight is focusing on three key innovations in high-speed digital design measurements, which are accelerate design/simulate, analyze/debug, and achieve compliant designs, said Gross, who then discussed several product offerings that illustrate each.

Gross discussed the new N1055A, which enables the highest resolution, TDR/TDT measurement, fast and accurate multiports, and a 50 GHz analog bandwidth.

A second is the high-performance J-BERT M8020A, which Gross says enables fast accurate receiver characterization, two channels at 16 Gbit/s, which will be expanded to 32 Gbit/s in a future version. The two-slot frame will also be expanded to a 14-slot frame, and Gross pointed out that the modules are synchronized so a customer who decides to purchase what he wants now won’t be locked in when the next iteration is out.

When asked about his current thoughts the growing interest in test automation, in other words doing it all in software versus hardware, Gross had this to say: "Frankly to me its more important to have the right set of APIs for these things rather than come up with our own solution. It may seem like something that some people want from us, but companies have their own EDA systems and test sequencing and they will not change for anyone. So we say let’s set up an interface which lets them do whatever they want."